The real meaning

10 legal terms that are often misunderstood

The popularity of legal movies and TV shows has resulted in people becoming familiar with terms and concepts they wouldn’t know otherwise, but it has also contributed to some mistaken ideas about what some of these terms mean. Is a waiver just a simple permit? What does free speech really entail? When does something qualify as hearsay? Here are 10 legal concepts you’ve probably heard before but might not mean what you think they do.

As any American knows, freedom of speech is an inalienable right, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But what does this mean? Freedom where or from whom? Many interpret this right as a freedom to express their mind everywhere and anywhere, but this is not exactly correct. Free speech is the guarantee we have as citizens that the government cannot censor, restrain, or interfere with our free and public expression. When it comes to private establishments and contexts, or to speech that might lead to harm to others, the right to free speech is not absolute.

Slander is a form of defamation, that is, damaging someone’s reputation by spreading false statements about them. But are all forms of defamation the same? There are many ways to spread false information or statements, but the law makes two main distinctions: whether or not it’s recorded or written down. While "slander" is a term we might hear often in legal shows, it refers strictly to spoken defamation, meaning an oral remark or statement, or a broadcast that was not recorded. For anything written down, published, or recorded, the proper term is "libel".

Many people think that waivers are similar to permits, so signing a waiver would be akin to giving your consent for something. While a waiver requires consent, it is not a simple permit. As its name suggests, it implies waiving or giving away something. In this case, a right. If you sign a liability, contractual, or any other type of waiver, you are willingly giving up a known right, privilege, or claim, which cannot be invoked later.

Whether something was done with malice or not might be the difference between a lesser or greater charge, both in civil and criminal law. But what is malice? In its legal sense, malice is not ill will or evilness, but the intention to cause harm or do something illegal without cause or justification. While mitigating circumstances such as accidents or spontaneous emotion might result in a lesser charge, malice will always increase the severity of the situation.

You might have heard this term in relation to car insurance, workers’ compensation, or divorce and wondered if it meant that no one was responsible. While there might be situations where no one’s to blame, this is not what no-fault systems are about. In many legal cases, determining the responsible party is necessary to resolve the case or award compensation. In a no-fault system, however, the law focuses on resolving the dispute rather than assigning blame, settling matters without needing to prove who is responsible.

Affidavits are quite common in all sorts of legal procedures, but their use in TV shows might make them seem as something that is only used in court. An affidavit is a written statement that the signer swears to be true, under penalty of perjury, and that is signed in front of a notary who can verify their identity. While affidavits can be presented in court in replacement of in-person testimony, they are also used in business, financial matters, official applications, and many other proceedings.

In everyday talk, we understand "hearsay" as information that you heard from someone else and are unable to verify. Legally, hearsay is slightly different, as it refers to written or spoken statements made outside the court that are presented as evidence. As the person who made the statement is not present to swear their veracity, hearsay is usually not admissible as proof, but the court might decide to accept it anyway if the situation requires it.

Unlike civil cases, criminal cases require that guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt to convict the accused. But what is reasonable doubt? The law is not asking the jury or judge to be 100% certain or to not have any shred of doubt left, but that they are firmly convinced by the evidence presented, with no other logical explanation. If their common sense and the evidence (or lack thereof) make them hesitate or admit a logical alternative, it means that the case was not proven "beyond a reasonable doubt", in which case the law gives the accused the benefit of the doubt.

It is common for people to group burglary with other criminal acts such as theft or robbery, but it belongs in a separate category. While robbery or theft involve taking someone else’s property without consent (i.e., stealing), burglary is the act of entering a place illegally to commit a crime inside. Why is it commonly associated with stealing then? Because most burglary cases involve theft.

We are used to referring to most illegal acts as crimes or offenses, but these terms strictly belong to criminal law. When it comes to civil law, which deals with private wrongs towards people and their property, the correct term is "tort", defined as a wrongful act that causes harm, loss, or injury to another person and that leads to legal liability, meaning that the person who committed the act is held responsible, whether it was intentional or not.

Who knew?

How did they know? 11 unbelievable cases of writers predicting the future

Image: Michael Dziedzic

Do modern inventions ever remind you of things you’ve read in old books? Do you ever find yourself pointing and saying, "Just like The Jetsons!" or "The Simpsons predicted this!"? Sometimes, real life ends up imitating art, even centuries later. Let’s explore 11 cases where writers anticipated the future, ranging from logical to downright eerie.

Image: K. Mitch Hodge

Did you know that a novel from 1898 predicted the Titanic disaster with an eerie degree of precision? Fourteen years before the real event, there was... the Titan.

Morgan Robertson published Futility, later retitled The Wreck of the Titan. It told the story of a massive British ocean liner called the Titan, described as unsinkable. The ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, carried too few lifeboats, and sank in April, all details that mirror the Titanic tragedy.

Image: Arthur Lambillotte

Isaac Asimov imagined the iPad, more or less, back in 1964. In an essay for The New York Times, the sci-fi legend described what life might look like in 2014. Among his predictions was that people would use a "compact screen" to read books, watch videos, and communicate with others, all without ever leaving their homes.

Asimov essentially foresaw smart electronic tablets and even hinted at remote work and distance learning decades before they became reality.

Image: Steve DiMatteo

In a 1998 episode of The Simpsons ("When You Dish Upon a Star"), Homer crashes into a Hollywood meeting and we briefly see a sign that reads: "20th Century Fox — a division of Walt Disney Co."

At the time, this was a playful nod to Disney’s ever-growing empire. But in 2019, it became real: Disney acquired 21st Century Fox for $71.3 billion.

Image: SpaceX

In his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne got more than one detail right, including which U.S. state would one day launch spaceships.

Verne imagined a three-man crew in a projectile fired from Florida (near modern-day Cape Canaveral) that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Yes, just like Apollo 11, more than a hundred years later. That’s a remarkably accurate prediction for a piece of fiction written during the Civil War era!

Image: Gabriel Benois

Do you remember seeing people communicate through large flat screens in The Jetsons and laughing at it as an exaggerated gag about the future? Well, who’s laughing now?

In Hanna-Barbera’s 1962 show, the characters used "televiewers" to chat across long distances, surprisingly similar to how we use Zoom or FaceTime today. Other works, like E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), had predicted remote video communication even earlier, but The Jetsons cemented the concept visually in pop culture.

Image: bady abbas

IVF was predicted as far back as 1924, 54 years before the first "test-tube baby" was born.

British biologist J.B.S. Haldane imagined a world of artificial reproduction. In his essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, he coined the term "ectogenesis" to describe babies being grown outside the womb.

Image: Emiliano Vittoriosi

In Steel Beach (1992), sci-fi author John Varley envisioned a future where artificial intelligence provided therapy. In his story, the Central Computer actively counsels people, offers psychological evaluations, and responds to emotional needs.

At a time when AI was still seen as a cold, mechanical concept, Varley’s story offered a surprisingly human twist. Today, studies show that many people using AI chatbots turn to them for emotional support and counseling.

Image: Possessed Photography

The word "robot" entered the English language in 1920 through a Czech play titled R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. These "robots" weren’t mechanical machines but biological workers created to serve humans. The name came from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." A century later, the term has clearly stuck.

Image: Mateo Avila Chinchilla

In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Arthur C. Clarke introduced HAL 9000, an AI so advanced it could carry out conversations, read lips, and make decisions. But Clarke’s futuristic vision also included video calls, flat-screen tablets, and casual digital multitasking, all decades before such technology existed.

HAL’s breakdown was fiction, but Clarke accurately foresaw how machines would gradually take over our attention.

Image: Olivier Amyot

In 1880, Mary E. Bradley published her book Mizora: A Prophecy. Maybe not all of the details in her all-female utopia were prophetic, but she did get one thing right: artificially grown meat. In her world, food wasn’t farmed but created through chemical processes in laboratories.

It sounded outlandish at the time, but today some food companies are doing exactly that. Bradley’s vision came long before environmentalism or animal rights were mainstream. Somehow, in a story about feminism and science, she also imagined what we might now call the vegan burger.

Image: Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk

Credit cards might seem like a very modern invention, but they were anticipated in an 1888 novel. Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, imagined a future in the year 2000 where everyone received a card loaded with "credit" from the government. People used this card to access goods from massive communal warehouses—similar to what we today would call department stores.